May 2010

May 31, 2010

As writer Chris Chibnall revealed in this month's Doctor Who magazine, he went back to Malcolm Hulke's Doctor Who And The Silurians as his inspiration for this two parter. With Cold Blood it's clear he doesn't know quite what to do with the Silurians once he's woken them up and rather like Hulke's original story, once you've shown that both races simply have too many differences to be able to get along, you either have to blow one of them up or send them back to sleep. Hulke used the internal conflicts of both the humans and the Silurians to represent the Cold War and post-colonial politics of the early 1970s and used the drama to show the wider consequences of the battle for the planet before...well...the Brigadier blows the Silurians up. I suspect the Eldane voice over was Chibnall's attempt to place this story into a broader context but it sits uneasily as historical commentary to a rather weak episode that is concentrated solely in an isolated mining village.

Cold Blood at its worst presented the complex problems of racial hatred, colonialist entitlements and apartheid between the humans and the Silurians in very simple 'Janet And John' terms. The scene showing Amy, Nasreen and Eldane thrashing out their negotiations and reaching a compromise had its heart in the right place, but was truly awful when it had Nasreen turning to question Amy about the terms of Silurian immigration and settlement, devolving into just one of those interminable Star Trek Picard/Sisko/Janeway foreign policy board meetings with the rubber faced 'Aliens Of The Week'.
Whereas it took the ANC and the National Party at least six years to establish a peaceful resolution to apartheid and a new constitution in South Africa, it took the three of them precisely five minutes to establish a legal framework for sharing the entire planet never mind a single country. The BA cabin crew strikes would be nipped in the bud with this team working at ACAS.

The big problem here is, of course, a sense of scale. These negotiations take place in a bubble that's divorced from the rest of the planet. At least, in previous Silurian stories the uneasy dialogue between the Silurians and the humans was given either a national or global scale with the mutual lack of trust being shown to have far bigger consequences on the wider populace of Earth.
Still, the script tries its best to show that all sides are culpable here and more or less treads the same ground as Hulke's Doctor Who And The Silurians. However, instead of the Brigadier blowing the reptiles up, we've got their leader realising that enforced hibernation for another 1000 years seems to be the only solution to the war that's brewing that will allow both sides some time to reflect on and potentially evolve in their attitudes.

To that end, Chibnall quickly tries to tie it up by having Nasreen and Tony stay behind as ambassadors in situ and the Doctor offering a sermon on the Welsh hills to spread the words of peace. Whereas in Hulke's script the xenophobic Major Baker succumbs to the Silurian plague as his just desserts for inflaming the conflict between the two races, the parallel character of Ambrose does at least have the consequences of her prejudices and mistakes presented to her. Ambrose and Tony are by far the most interesting characters in the story in that they do have a clear learning curve through the story, which is more than can be said for some. Ambrose is at least full of remorse in the end (a decent performance from Nia Roberts here) and agrees to take what she's learned about herself to bring up Elliot with the proper attitude.

However, morally, there are some mind-bogglingly strange notes in the script. Malohkeh, the Silurian Dr. Mengele, has happily been dissecting human beings for years and the Doctor doesn't even question it and actually allies himself to the scientist, who fifteen minutes in is upbraiding the military commander Restac for her methods in subjugating the humans. Better than plunging a scalpel into them, eh, Malohkeh? Presumably, he's the one who's been body snatching out of the local graveyard and planting the blue grass then? The Doctor merrily slaps the lizard on the back for reviving Elliot and conveniently forgets to mention the years of cruel scientific experiments he's carried out. I'm sure Mo will be proudly showing off that dissection scar down the pub next week too and like Elliot's kidnap it's all too casually brushed aside.

The Doctor also seems to get on his high horse a little too often here with the humans, blaming them for much of what has happened when in fact Malohkeh and Alaya had actually taken it upon themselves to attack the humans. He's quite happy tearing strips off Ambrose for what she's done, looking down his nose at her and the others for not being the shining exemplar he pompously expected them to be, but he's hardly been a reliable moral compass in this story. Eldane isn't exactly leadership material either and seems a rather pallid and ineffectual creature in the face of the military might of Restac. And just why was there a vast army of Silurians hidden away underground? When did their culture become so militarised?

I was willing to give the Silurian re-design some time last week but looking at them again this week just proved to me how utterly wrong the thinking was here from the design team. To take away their one memorable characteristic - the pulsating third eye - and then deck them out in skirts and fish nets, give them masks that make them look like toothless old hags and big clunky ray-guns just reduces them to the very thing fanboy Chibnall moaned about back in the 1980s. Worse still, they smother national treasure Stephen Moore in a horrid kaftan and the Star Trek make up to play Eldane, a sort of Silurian Nelson Mandela.

He looks less than dignified, alas, just when the script needed as much dignity as it could get and whereas Neve McIntosh really inhabits the make up and adds little physical ticks to breathe life into both Alaya and Restac, Moore doesn't quite seem to make the prosthetics work for him, almost afraid to work his facial muscles to bring life to the role, looking a little like he's just left the dentist with an anaesthetised face. A shame really because the rest of the episode actually looks rather good. There is an attempt to give a sense of visual scale to the episode with a lovely Gaudi inspired flavour to the production design which for the most part is highly attractive but sadly can't quite stretch to completely disguise the familiarity of Cardiff's Temple Of Peace location shoot. The lighting is particularly good and the brief use of Plantasia in Swansea as a location is effective too.

After all the thumpingly obvious signalling in The Hungry Earth, it was only a matter of time before we got to what I assumed was supposed to be a shocking ending with the death of Rory. Again, the script, direction and acting can't quite decide how this needs to be pitched and the biggest stumbling block is that the emotional edge has been worn off this laboriously signposted conclusion by the equally similar 'death of Rory' scene in Amy's Choice. I am sad that Rory has seemingly been killed off but there really isn't any emotional value in that scene and if, as I also suspect, that Rory will be restored then what exactly was the point in killing him off. Equally, now that Amy has forgotten him completely, then it just makes all the business in Vampires Of Venice and Amy's Choice rather inconsequential and redundant.

The series, in trying to build the moral and emotional dimensions of its characters and the consequences of the stories, when its subtext has been about remembering and forgetting, ironically seems to either forget that they exist or remove them completely just after they've been introduced.
Amy and the Doctor have an adventure, something terrible and emotional happens, and then they go on a trip to Venice, or Rio or Wales and forget about it. Whether this is a consequence of related scenes being dropped from episodes isn't clear but both The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood feel like they've been victims of some very judicious editing. I can perhaps understand the Doctor's attitude because he's alien and has lived a long time but Amy trots through each story without the character palpably growing in stature. Even with Rory's death, she's robbed of her grief by the very 'crack in time' story device that Moffat's using across the series. That's either a very clever or a very stupid thing and I'm not sure we'll know which until the bloody Pandorica finally opens.

I'm not proposing a return to RTD's use of the domestic drama to ground the stories and develop the emotional range of the characters but just an acknowledgment that if you are going to make a series-wide arc so prominent in the stories, to the point of using it to actually kill off characters, then the consequences need to be seen to affect the other characters and story developments in significant ways across the episodes. There's a problem for me as, by not caring about Amy, then I don't really care if she can remember Rory or not. I'm not emotionally invested in the character enough for the death of Rory to really matter to me.

And if the Doctor knows how terrible the crack in time is then why has he spent nine episodes not doing anything about it? Unlike, say 'Bad Wolf', 'Saxon' or any of the other series-wide memes that have threaded each series together and led towards a two or three part finale, the 'crack in time' sub-plot is actually more front and centre than any of those memes and we, both the audience and the characters, know what it does and see the obvious threat again and again. The urgency it signals is ignored and the attempt to build a mystery into the series is constantly interrupted by the blatant moving of gears within certain stories to underline but not challenge the threat.

Cold Blood is pretty to look at (apart from that poor CGI explosion of the drill head) but never really gets its hands dirty with the wider political, moral, environmental and global consequences of waking the Silurians up. There was a chance here, suggested by the Eldane voice over, to do a big story that would deal with many of the wider implications of the Doctor Who and Torchwood universes, of dealing with another species face to face in a world that has already seen alien invasions and where government agencies already know about the existence of the Silurians. Instead, we simply got a lot of species-ist agit-prop in an isolated Welsh village with a population of about a dozen, the destruction of a multi-million pound drill head (won't the government investigate the explosion and the disappearance of Tony and Nasreen?) and the contrived death of a supporting character.

It was very clichéd. It was very routine. Running up and down corridors and silly monsters - Chris Chibnall, Open Air, 1986

A common complaint regarding this lacklustre two-parter is that we've seen it all before. Silurians wake up. Silurians want the planet back. Apes don't like them apples and so chaos ensues before everything inevitably ends in tragedy. Seen it, bought the DVD, designed the website. You literally know the drill. But to be fair to Chris Chibnall, he does manage to introduce some unique twists on what's gone before. It's just a shame they are all terrible.

In the Pertwee era, the planet was under threat from an ultra-secret drilling project that looked like it cost a bomb to operate. In Chibnall's version it's a couple of bumbling fools in what looks suspiciously like a garden shed. In Inferno the base was staffed by a small army and security was as tight as a nut, but here the earth shattering project looks like somebody's strange idea of a hobby. They've somehow managed to drill further into the earth than anyone before them and yet there's no press, no military, and no nosey neighbours anywhere to be seen. Where's their bloody Facebook group? Why isn't Kay Burley haranguing a miner? Why do the Silurians put up a heat shield anyway? Who are they trying to keep out? The postman?

In the Pertwee era peace was averted by the pig-headed, xenophobic military establishment who proceed to bomb the crap out of the poor, misunderstood reptiles. In Chibnall's version war is almost started by a loud woman with a handbag who looks like she's wandered off the set of Jeremy Kyle. However, instead of bombing the crap out of them at the end she vows instead to encourage her traumatised son to start preaching a new and strange religion about giant lizard men taking over the planet in a thousand years time. And David Icke thought he had it bad - all this kid has to go on is some blue grass and a collapsed mine shaft. The Doctor also appears to have forgotten that the planet will be purged by solar flares just as the Silurians are waking up, but he's having a bad day so I'll forgive him.

Why isn't Kay Burley haranguing a miner?

In ye good olde days, the Silurians looked truly alien. Even if they weren't really, which just made seem even more odd to me. In Chibnall's version the Silurians look like they've just walked off the set of Babylon 5. They must sense deep down inside that they look crap or they wouldn't go to all that trouble of making scary, alien-looking face masks. It's little wonder they plunge the earth into darkness - they're a laughing stock! I reckon that the fat bloke and the terrible comedian will mate with this particular strand of Silurian and they'll end up looking even more human the next time we meet them. Perhaps they'll just have green eyes and extremely dexterous tongues. It'll save a fortune on the budget.

In the original Silurian story, the Silurians were depicted as a fully developed race with complex shades of grey. In Chibnall's version there are good Silurians and there are bad Silurians. Even the ones that torture humans and grave-rob for some inexplicable reason are good eggs (try not to squirm with embarrassment as the Doctor does the hand jive with the reptilian Dr. Mengele) but they don't come any nicer than the Silurian King. He's ridiculously reasonable seconds after being woken up. I don't know about you but I'd be a tad more suspicious about that bloody great drill bearing down on my civilization - especially before my first cup of coffee.

In the original Silurian epic, a terrible plague was unleashed on planet earth and the Doctor had to race against time to come up with a cure. In Chibnall's version a bloke gets a nasty rash and has to sit down for a bit.

the Silurians look like they've walked off the set of Babylon 5...

Are we really suposed to believe that Amy, Nashreem and the Lizard King are going to thrash out a lasting peace? It's a bizarre scene: one minute Meera Syal is sledgehammering us with her BNP style-immigration policy, the next she is giving up half of Australia for something that might cure PMT once and for all. I would loved to have seen Amy and Nasreem heading off to the UN to seal that deal. What utter nonsense.

And is this is the first time we've seen the Doctor attempt to kick-start a whole new timeline (I bet Lance Parkin almost shat himself) - and doesn't that remind you of something else in this series?

But that doesn't matter - there's a bad Silurian on the loose! Two bad Silurians! And if you can't keep up they both look the same! And that's about as morally ambiguous as it gets.

But who cares? No one will talk about the first 85 minutes of this tiresome, hackneyed, reheated tripe as they'll all be focusing on the final 5 minutes that could have occurred in practically any other adventure.

It's bollocks.

And it's such a blatant cheat I can hardly bring myself to bother discussing it. If Rory doesn't come back unscathed I'll eat my Fisher Price Leela Doll with a side helping of Rolykin Daleks. It's bollocks.

And who didn't see it coming a mile off? The pompous voice over at the beginning of the second episode spelt it out in capital letters, and the "future Rory waving blissfully" followed by "no one dies today" speech rammed it home long before that. They might as well have stuck that image of him on the right on the front of The Radio Times.

The crack itself remains an interesting concept, though. There's a chunk of a police telephone box stuck inside it, although how the Doctor can remove his hand with no ill effects but they can't drag Rory into the TARDIS is baffling. And it's quite clever to "kill" someone significant without all that bloody angst that goes with it. I mean, just look at Time-Flight. Er, on second thoughts...

May 30, 2010

Companion deaths on the television version of Doctor Who are comparatively rare. Adric and Katarina is about the shape of it, and probably Sara Kingdom. In the spin-off Whoniverse it’s a veritable bloodbath, from C’rizz through to Roz Forrester with a whole multi-novel plot arc dedicated to finishing off some television’s plus ones (or twos) in ambiguous circumstances, including Sarah Jane Smith. They get dropped in a parallel universe, walk from the TARDIS or have their memory wiped and there’s collateral damage outside of the Doctor’s immediate circle but the death of a Tardis traveller in a family show on Saturday night BBC One? That’s a very thick chalk line to cross.

Unlike the viewers who immediately ran to twitter and made Rory’s name a trending topic for the next hour right into Eurovision and on the night that Dennis Hopper died, I wasn’t emotional drawn by the death, certainly not in the same way as the last time a main character died in the Whoniverse (#saveiantojones? Um, no.) Partly it was the shock that Moffat had done the one thing Russell T Davies said he could never do (cf, Donna Noble) but mostly its because the writing and direction seemed to want to us to ponder the implications of the death rather than feel it on a gut level.

#saveiantojones? Um, no.

Most of the scene was played from the Doctor’s point of view. From the moment Amy desperately asked him to do something to save her already gone fiancé’s life, we were given a sea of reaction shots of the timelord’s impotent face, and the ensuing action was about how he was going to get Amy into the Tardis and tellingly when he finally managed to bring himself to simply grab her by the torso and carry her through the threshold, instead of a close-up of her crying desperately at the door as the machine took off, we were right up on the Doctor blankly working the controls.

Only as the two worked to try to and keep Rory’s memory alive did the story become a joint one again but the implication throughout was still that the nurse’s death wasn’t simply a random fatality but an important part of the ongoing storyline and we were left to ruminate on the narrative consequences, for the rest of the series and beyond. If Rory didn’t exist, what was Amy’s choice? How did she escape Francesco, let alone get into the non-vampire school in the first place? What about all of the people he helped save in his day job?

If Rory didn’t exist, what was Amy’s choice?

The implication is – evidenced by the irksome reappearance of future Amy, alone on the hill this time – that the web of time has knitted itself back into place to resolve any of these inconsistencies. The crack, in wiping someone from existence, goes in with the Dettol equivalent of quantum physics to sterilise the wound and give it some stitches, but unlike the reapers in Father’s Day the process also removes them from the memory. Except, presumably because he’s a timelord, the Doctor remembers. As does BBC Books who have given Rory extra adventures in the next three releases in the range.

Rory’s death was slotted in at the close of what up until then had been a fairly stolidly traditional Doctor Who story which wasn’t especially bad and like last week offered moments of nostalgia but didn’t quite sing, giving the impression that Moffat and Chibnall’s motive was to put us into a false state of security (even if Arthur Darvill’s non-appearance in the previews of upcoming episode in Doctor Who Magazine gave the impression of something occurring) before smacking us around the head with Rory’s old lady battering stick: “You’re watching nu-Who, stupid.”

“You’re watching nu-Who, stupid.”

Unlike last week’s episode which could be viewed with all the comfort of a classic series dvd release bar the annoying unskippable caption, easter egg of a continuity announcement and randomly edited documentary about dinosaurs, this was about as entertaining as one of those generic Star Trek: Voyager episodes in which Janeway’s negotiations towards an alien race are going well until Seven of Nine goes borg and shoots one of them in the face (before attempting to assimilate the corpse). With a sub-plot in which Harry Kim tries to teach the EMH about the joys of flower arranging.

I was better disposed to The Hungry Earth because it seemed like a genuine attempt to tackle classic Who in much the same way that Todd Hayne’s worshipped Douglas Sirk in Far From Heaven or Steven Soderbergh riffed off Michael Curtiz and old Hollwood during The Good German. Except both those films and other similar experiments then attempted to do something interesting, either by introducing greater thematic weight or simply content that would not have been permissible in the earlier form and that seemed to be way things were heading in the, as it turned out, rather disingenuous NEXT TIME trailer with all the talk of “fixed points” and the implication that Rory would be going Jack Bauer on prisoner Alaya.

all the narrative simplicity of the Gordian Knot

Unfortunately Cold Blood simply continued to be a rough remake of Doctor Who and the Silurians which is fine, except television has moved on and our expectations have changed and though there will be a large section of the meagre audience that won’t have seen Malcolm Hulke’s classic, there has to be more to it, especially in a season with all the narrative simplicity of the Gordian Knot. The picture book nature of The Beast Below worked for me because despite its unsophisticated structure, it still pinioned on big emotional character beats for the regulars. It’s funny how in this concluding episode, when the moral questions are passed to the incidental elements of humanity, it’s far less potent.

Partly that was to do with execution. Neither of the sub-plots, the negotiations for humanity or the protection (or not) of Alaya were presented from Amy or Rory’s point of view. There was no conflict here. Amy was slightly reticent, but we caught little of the responsibility which had been placed on her shoulders and the point of agreement with the Silurians was treated with all the excitement of a corporate brainstorming session in a firm of accountants -- though admittedly it was interesting see that in this televised debate, Meera Syal’s Nasreen was the one to present the case against immigration with Stephen Moore’s amenable Eldane offering a list of benefits.

we caught little of the responsibility which had been placed on her
shoulders

Additionally, because Rory wasn’t sitting on top of their prisoner for the duration, he just became one of the humans rather than a regular. He should have been in there, trying but failing to defend their captive from Ambrose, who by this point had simply become an example of the human waste that inhabited the shuttle bus in Midnight. I know I’m drifting into writing about what wasn’t there instead of what was, which is a dirty habit, but Chibnall’s approach to scripting in Cold Blood took a retrograde step backwards to the first series of Torchwoodwhen it was usually impossible to consistently see the interior of a character unless they were having something inserted into them.

My hunch is that like The Hungry Earth, Cold Blood overran and whilst the structure and expositional point of most scenes survived, the local colour is still sitting on a server connected to the Avid editing suite, despite the longer timeslot it was gifted. Syal’s participation seemed truncated and until the very end and the burst of emotion, Amy was largely reduced to a default wisecrack setting. Moore’s voiceover, however welcome to those of us who remember his audiobook version of Hitchhikers, and however epic its motives in suggesting “big history happening right now!” sounded like something imported to paper over some narrative cracks. No not those kinds of cracks.

"big history happening right now!”

And yet, and yet, despite these reservation, it wasn’t horrible, it’s was still watchable. Mostly that was down to Matt Smith who is a god, basically, someone managing to collect all of our childhood memories of what the Doctor was like with those pesky expectation built up over the past five years. He oscillates between wimpy, genial and commanding, Pertwee’s indispensable moments of charm, stretched out across an entire performance. When he said to Ambrose that she wasn’t the best humanity had to offer, I felt like he was disappointed with me too.

Anyone who suggests that he’s still no David Tennant should be made to sit down at loud-hailer shaped gun thing-point in front of the closing moments of this episode in which a mixture of guilt and bewilderment wash over him but unable to really show it in front of a companion who’s entirely unaware of the source and probably wouldn’t believe him anyway. There was some good support too from Robert Pugh as the stoic Tony and Nia Roberts who at least sought to turn her character into something approaching a real, if flawed human being. Richard Hope was similarly effective as Malohkeh, initially giving the impression of being a reptilian Mengele but turned out to be a good sort really. Despite the torture.

Why bother making the connection at all etc. etc.

If only these performances weren’t being slightly undermined throughout with niggles like the reappearance of a hardly redressed Platform One from The End of the World (Cardiff’s The Chapel of Peace) and the CG explosion of the drill which was less convincing than a similar interpolated detonation on The Time Warrior dvd which was probably produced on a fraction of the budget. I was also finally drawn to admit that the rather generic make-up for this genus of Silurians simply lacked the imagination of the originals -- and omitting the third eye was vandalism basically. Why bother making the connection at all etc. etc.

Will Rory stay dead? Well, if Adric can be resurrected for an audio, it could be that when the Pandorica opens, the Doctor sacrifices the TARDIS to save him and put time back together. Which would be about right because I’m developing the opinion that the cracks are actually lesions created by the time machine, the Doctor’s travels having finally begun to create holes in space-time and that the cracks appear when he does something to change the natural order of events. When he said in The Beast Below that they shouldn’t become involved, he was right in every respect and that despite his decades long protestations to the contrary, he knows less about what he’s doing than Rose in Father’s Day.

Next Week: We hopefully get the Richard Curtis who wrote The Girl in the Café, rather than the hack who turned out Love Actually.

May 27, 2010

Introducing the very first Tachyon TV vidcast: a lighthearted documentary on the Gallifrey Conventions in LA during 2009-2010. A larger version and a download link is available via the new-look Tachyon TV website which also includes an interactive podcast player.

As far as fairy tale allusions go then The Gruffalo is I suppose an interesting allegorical choice for this week's Doctor Who. Julia Donaldson's story about the mouse that exploits fear of a mythical beast to scare away predators is pretty much at the heart of The Hungry Earth as father and son read it together and later the father sits and reads it whilst on night duty at the drilling complex. It conjures up a number of ideas and themes. It is traditionally a book that parents and children read together, often amongst the first books used to teach a child to read. With Chris Chibnall's overtly Pertwee-a-thon of a script, bolting together an array of 1970s classic Doctor Who tropes, we could almost be getting the same experience.

A very child friendly, mildly scary Doctor Who that can be digested by children and parents in the same company and about as non-threatening a version of Doctor Who they're ever likely to share as viewers. It once again skews the series to the more child friendly end of the audience spectrum and again, like many of the episodes this year, throws in familiar childhood fears that evoke in adults their own memories of such anxieties. Hence, we get a central child character who, after his father has been swallowed up by the earth, is allowed to go wandering about unchaperoned in the dark (by a Doctor who is as much a child himself when it comes to facing dangers) just as the monsters have started skulking round the graveyard. The fears of parental abandonment by children loom large in this episode and the central figure of over-protected Elliot is separated from both his mother and father in the story and is likely the symbolic trigger for what will be Ambrose's attitude to the SIlurians.

It also evokes some very Gruffalo-esque qualities in the Doctor. Surely, the Doctor is the mouse who, like a Zen master that uses his antagonists' aggression against them, here reassures the child that he has met monsters before and they're usually the ones afraid of him. By his very nature, the Doctor is the tallest of all tall stories (especially now that he's played by the gangly Matt Smith) but the current series is in danger of over playing the whole fairy tale motif until it becomes obvious and dull. This Zen like approach to confronting one's enemies, where The Gruffalo is a story of a mouse and a monster that shows no matter how gruesome the monsters children can create in their own minds, they are never as bad as they imagine them to be, is given strength by the Doctor's encounter with Alaya where he at first removes the mask from her face and, like the liberal Englishman he is, pulls up a fold away chair, crosses his legs and calmly gets behind her defensive bullshit. It's certainly one of the best scenes in a well paced slow burn of an introduction, and suggests that the morality of their relative positions might be further built upon in the concluding half of the story.

What's less intriguing is the all surface and no substance Pertwee love-in. Welsh mines and infected green-veined miners (he should have been called Bert) straight out of The Green Death; a drilling project that Sir Keith Gold would have fretted about only if the boss was Stahlman and not Chaudhry and they were looking for a new form of energy (and just where are the hand wringing politicians in Doctor Who these days?); a village and its church surrounded by a force barrier and Silurians that appear to have a 1970s wardrobe designed by Paco Rabanne. Writer Chris Chibnall clearly has great affection for the Pertwee years but it's a pity that none of the real political vitality of those halcyon days was present here.

They seem to be drilling for the sake of it and no none yet seems remotely bothered about the effects on the environment (quite serendipitous that this was transmitted in the aftermath of the appalling oil drilling disaster in the Mexican Gulf) and the encounter with the Silurians has barely explored the political theme of the indigenous species versus the rampant colonial invader, a very British concern that Doctor Who used to tackle with gusto in the 1970s and which has lost its resonance since most of our colonies desperately demanded independence from us years ago. There is potential to see further analogies to the 'Britain for the British' tub-thumping albeit reversed here with the Silurians spitting blood about us pesky apes. No, for the moment this is all suggestive window dressing until hopefully we get some serious sub-text in the second half.

There are some oddly unexplained moments here too. Why are the bodies of the dead being removed from their graves? It's a nice little way to split Rory off from the Doctor and Amy and have him doing his own bit of investigating but after standing in one of the graves pondering on what exactly to do the idea sort of fizzles out. What was the point of the Silurians blocking out the daylight when they surrounded the village with the energy barrier? Just so the Doctor could swan about with a pair of clever heat vision Ray-Bans? There's a sense here of delaying tactics, putting enough of these oddities into the script to prevent it rushing too quickly to its conclusion and, again, based on this sense I reckon the meat of the story is in the second part.

There are enough rewards to be had though. I rather enjoyed that the supporting characters were actually fleshed out, given the extra time afforded by a two-parter. The relationship between Nasreen and Tony blooming as disaster strikes; Nasreen's reaction to the trip in the TARDIS and her growing admiration of the Doctor, with its 'old school' charm momentarily bringing Amy's cynicism and bitching into very sharp relief; and the Doctor's empathy with dyslexic Elliot ('Oh that's all right. I can't make a decent meringue') were all decent moments. The chase in the graveyard and Elliot's kidnap was also very atmospheric and tense as was Amy's rather horrified reaction to a potential dissection by Silurian (a neat parallel with the Doctor's criticism of Tony's willingness to dissect their attackers earlier in the episode).

I don't know about you but to me it's a bit obvious that Rory's days in the TARDIS are numbered. There is the heavy telegraphing of that opening scene between him and Amy where he takes her engagement ring off and puts it in the TARDIS for safe keeping. I can already see a distraught Amy finding that ring and wishing there had been another way. To really emphasise it, Chibnall plonks Rory in the middle of a graveyard and stands him in an empty grave. Subtle! And just what on earth was going on in the scene where the Doctor, Amy and Rory spot another Amy and Rory waving to them from a hillside? The Doctor brushes it off as a future version of them coming to relive past glories but that just sounds either like obvious misdirection or some serious over-indulgence. Or are they on that hill trying to warn themselves of the danger they are about to face. Something is afoot and we should cast our minds back to that original 3D trailer which climaxed with the screen filling with a Silurian mask.

Shall we also take bets on who is going to start the war with the Silurians and fulfill Alaya's martyrdom complex? Will it be Tony, going all green veined on us or will it be Ambrose and her anger management issues symbolised by the huge pile of blunt instruments and guns that she's piled into her van? Again, the big speech from the Doctor about how they must be the best humans they can be in the impending crisis and how they have the potential to be brilliant just sounds like he's making excuses for what will be a regrettable blood-bath in next week's episode. It was hardly surprising that Nasreen was the only one clapping after that pompous twaddle. Ambrose will seek to protect her child and husband with as much zeal as Alaya, an equally determined female, will continue screaming for a war to reclaim what is rightfully the Silurians home.

One of the big problems with The Hungry Earth is the re-design of the Silurians. I can understand that it must be easier for an actor to give a better performance if the special effects make up allows you a wide range of expressions but here the Silurians we know and love, with their big ears, circular mouth/nose and that wonderful third eye have been replaced by a close cousin of the Jem'Hadar. It's a very good make up but it's hardly a radical re-design and why have they suddenly got into the habit of popping on a mask? It's a good performance from Neve McIntosh but, old fashioned as I am, I want Radiophonic strangeness over my dodgy and not so dodgy accents and that pulsating third eye. But that's me wanting my cake and eating it and there are I suppose enough moments of Pertwee pastiche already in evidence.

For an episode completely driven by the return and reveal of a classic monster and their vast underground city, the new Silurians still need to go some distance to differentiate themselves from their Star Trek: Deep Space Nine cousins. It's not a bad episode and is certainly an improvement on Chibnall's previous efforts on both Doctor Who and Torchwood but it perhaps suffers from the stuffing in of all the familiar Doctor Who tropes from the 1970s as pure set-up for the second part of the story. Some good performances, some tense and scary moments but it didn't quite make the earth move for me. Let's hope the pay-off is a good one.

May 24, 2010

There are some Who fans who'll think I'm insane, because I disliked last week’s ambitious and heavily psychological Amy's Choice, but thoroughly enjoyed The Hungry Earth, which amounts to what Erik of Bridging the Rift described as "Who-by-numbers." Indeed, this week’s story is in a lot of ways business as usual for the TARDIS crew, but I find that refreshing in a weekend where two huge mythology shows have their earth-shattering finales. I like it when a show breaks out of its own patterns, but I think last week was a botched attempt, and so it’s nice to see the show back to doing what it does best and doing it well. And it's just as earth-shattering, but in a more... you know... literal way.

Of course, the inevitable criticism that this story is more or less the same as 1970’s annoyingly-mistitled “Doctor Who and the Silurians” is not without its merits, but then again the same could easily be said of the Silurians’ other classic appearances in “The Sea Devils” and “Warriors of the Deep.” Leaving aside (at least until next week) the question of whether it was a good idea to bring back the Silurians (Eocenes, Homo reptilians, or whatever they decide to call them this time), but given that they were returning, the same basic story was part of the package. The Silurians don’t have the versatility of the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans or Autons. The only story you can really tell about Silurians is one in which they crawl out of the sea (or ground) to take back a planet they feel has been stolen from them.

Perhaps that’s unfair, as I’ve never seen what’s been done with them in spin-off media, but that’s what the Silurians are all about and so at the very least, that’s what you need to do when you’re introducing them to an audience for the first time. So with the basic science fictional concept of the story essentially predetermined, what’s left to writer Chris Chibnall is the drama he chooses to put in the foreground. The Sea Devils took the concept of the Silurians and set it alongside the personal conflict between the Doctor and the Master. Warriors of the Deep (a story I rather enjoy, Myrka be damned) set it against a cold war between two human governments. This time, Chibnall takes the Silurian concept and sets it in a small Welsh settlement with a tiny population and copious additions of base-under-siege added to taste.

How very Pertwee.

And of course, they couldn’t resist throwing in a drill. Humans, in the name of progress, digging deep into the ground and unleashing something dark that was best left buried. How very Pertwee. I’ve always been a Nu-Who man at heart, but some of my earliest forays into the classic series were with the Third Doctor and season seven in particular. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I have such a soft spot for that era, and even though the Tenth Doctor was very much my Doctor, the Third had the distinction of being my favorite Doctor (although both are quickly being eclipsed by Matt Smith). Inferno was one of the first classic stories I ever saw, and the Beneath the Surface box set was another early Who DVD purchase for me, so I admit I’m tickled by the prominent shades of Pertwee in this story, even if I don’t have the old-school fan experience to fully appreciate this as a “love letter” to the writers and producers of the program’s UNIT days.

But then, the majority of viewers won’t even get it to the extent I did. I don’t have numbers to back this up, but I suspect the greater part of Doctor Who’s current audience has never seen an episode with Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, and even many of those who have probably won’t pick up on just how heavily influenced by Pertwee this story was. Some may even think that the Silurians are a new monster, as their return has (rightly) been hyped far less than previous returning classic baddies, even the Sontarans (who outrank them, but only just). The days where the show could get any real mileage out of resurrecting icons of the show’s past are mostly behind it, despite constant rumors of the Rani’s return (I’d rather have Glitz or Sil first, thank you). So it’s possible that by positioning this as a sort of neo-Pertwee adventure (something previously and successfully attempted in The Lazarus Experiment) Moffat, Chibnall et al have crafted a story that will fall a little flat with the not-We, who might receive it with a bit of a ho-hum.

Whether that’s the case or not we’ll probably have to wait until next week to find out, but it’s certainly true that this story lacks the dramatic richness you might expect from the second two-parter of the year. It became a bit of a tradition, especially in series three and series four, that the first two part Doctor Who story of the year would be a lighter affair featuring a returning classic monster, and the second two-part story often has a lot more dramatic weight to it. Moffat seems to have reversed the situation and front-loaded the really tense stuff, and while next week’s conclusion looks fine enough, it won’t be The Family of Blood or Forest of the Dead, that’s for sure. Perhaps I’m wrong: the bit in the trailer about time being in flux could connect this story to the season arc in a shocking way, or it could just be be misdirection. My instinct is that Rory or Amy will point out that they have to survive, or else how would their future selves be there? And the Doctor will object that it "doesn’t work like that," and that will be the end of it. But I’ve been wrong before. Sometimes things are not what they seem.

Nasareen is charming and likable. I'll be sad when she inevitably dies next week.

But even if everything is what it seems here, it’s still a good story. Getting Amy out of the way for an episode gives the Doctor the opportunity to work with other companions. Rory takes on the companion role, and while he’s not spotlighted as much as I’d like him to be it’s clear that he’s more than just a Mickey 2.0 because the writers are committed to taking him seriously as a character (and, I hope, as a long-term companion). Meera Syal’s Nasareen is charming and likable, possibly destined to be remembered as a great pseudo-companion like Sally Sparrow or Joan Redfern... or perhaps more like Lynda with a y. I'll be sad when she inevitably dies next week.

Writer Chris Chibnall and director Ashley Way are both veterans of Torchwood, particularly its oft-maligned pre-Children-of-Earth iteration, and neither of them has a spotless track record, but here they both perform admirably, with enough clever dialogue bits and cinematic flair to keep the story afloat through what mostly amounts to setup for next week’s main event. And lots of setup it is. But it says a lot about the quality of the episode that it was able to retain my interest during a weekend when Doctor Who is destined not to be the most important or interesting thing on television, facing steep competition from the Gene Genie and the Losties. Perhaps I liked it so much because it didn’t demand too much of me while my televisual attention is devoted elsewhere. But while there’s a lot less to say about this episode than about either of those finales, The Hungry Earth still hangs together quite well as a by-the-book Doctor Who first part.

May 23, 2010

Blackpool won the Championship League play-off this afternoon. I don’t know anything about football and indeed could care less about it most of the time, but I can totally understand the thrill which the fans of the winning club must have experienced at the final whistle because I suspect (though obviously can’t confirm so bear with me here) it’s much the same as I feel at the end of a particularly good film and for the purposes of this blog, an entertaining slab of Doctor Who (which a cup final success similar to a season ender though we won’t be able to test that out until the Pandorica opens). At the very least it must have made up for the closure of a certain exhibition recently.

Which is my way of saying that contrary to the Twitter reaction (you know who you are) tonight’s closing title squeeze was greeted with applause from me which considering my historic enmity with writer Chris Chibnall and director Ashley Way (who was also on early Torchwood and so will be forever guilty by association) was rather a surprise. I’ll admit to being charmed from top to bottom and though I’ll also admit to a couple of retrospective reservations (which we’ll come to) this was more or less everything I’d want and expect from an episode of Doctor Who. We're even still in the countryside.

contrary to the Twitter reaction

Before you ram issue 413 of Doctor Who Magazine down my throat (or some other orifice) and shout “What does that make The Caves of Androzani?” I will add that so far this isn’t the best story ever and no matter how good episode nine is it still won’t be. City of Death wuz robbed. But what it does deliver is a good old fashioned love letter to the Pertwee era and a reminder that even in this new(ish) version of the franchise with Steven Moffat’s fairy tale noodlings burrowing through it, that he’s still interested sometimes in offering a good old fashioned alien invasion story with a moral pulse, a tribute to the Silurian’s original creator Malcolm Hulke (albeit with a shorter miniskirt than Katie might have risked).

There is just something very comforting about an episode that throws out all of the post-modern tricks we’ve become accustomed to and goes about the business of showing us as traditional a Who story as possible that unlike The Waters of Mars which reported the standard Proppian/Dickian/Daviesian elements as a way of foregrounding the impending doom of the Doctor’s alien morality, just wants to leave us entertained. For all the lush photography and rustic charm with a few obvious exceptions, parts of this episode look like we should be viewing them through the same gausy quality of episodes which now only exist in off-air NTSC copies down to the BBC Micro inspired graphic of the lizard's flatulence propulsion.

Just once the Eleventh Doctor is allowed to gradually follow the mystery, from the initial clue of the blue grass, through to breaking into an industrial building then gaining the trust of some scientist who’s experiment has rattled the cage of something other, with his companions becoming separated so that they can discover some bits of plot (nice moment for Rory in the grave) before falling into some peril (literally in Amy’s case) and taking refuge in a church up some other devil's end. Arguably we have seen set ups in other episodes built on the Doctor’s own curiosity (notably The Beast Below), none of them as been quite this bald in execution. About the only deviation is the Pertweevian cliché of the Doctor's perennial capture being turned on its
head with his antagonist finding herself in the cell instead.

the Pertweevian cliché

Dr Nasreen Chaudhry and her new boyfriend Tony seem designed to merge the main early 70s bystander character types, like Ruth from The Time Monster finding something in common with Bert from The Green Death. Of course, if this was a proper homage there would be a stereotypical Tory presence on hand tutting as the drilling was stopped for whatever reason (though given that this story is set in 2020 and depending on your optimism at the present climate it might as well be a Lib Dem – Chris Hulme’s in charge of the environment now after all). Their role is arguably substituted with the fantastically named Ambrose whose collection of domestic weaponry is meant to suggest she’ll be the one to go Stahlman in the next episode, though it's clearly a front and Rory will be the on wielding the axe.

Despite what some fans my suggest, we haven’t seen enough of the new Silurian/Eocenes yet to really judge. One of the b-list monsters along with the Sontarans, their reputation has grown large enough for us to forget that they’ve only appeared in two television stories and only one good story at that. For fans I’d argue, it’s Hulke’s Target novelisation which has sealed their reputation and perhaps their infrequent contradictory appearances in spin-off media, including The Coup, that amazing preview that came free with DWM for the audio UNIT spin-off in which a new knighted Brigadier attempts to help them be mankind’s first contact with alien life, only to have humanity dismiss them as men in rubber suits!

a new knighted Brigadier

Understandably the redesign, neatly another new branch of the species so as not to tread on what’s gone before employs the Star Trek/Frontier in Space appliance of allowing us to see the actor’s faces. Taking into account the compensating mask which will no doubt come into play more in the next episode as way of cutting down on make-up requirements (and to give Forbidden Planet a bumber Christmas), that does mean that they may lack the enigmatic features of the likes of Ichtar and the wonderfully impractical flashing light but allows them a much wider range of emotions as seen in the interrogation scene we’ll discuss later. They’re also more agile. The scenes in the graveyard are gripping stuff, their Raston Robot like silhouette a perfectly alien shape against the stone and greenery. Plus, doubters at least the reinvention of the Myrka hinted at in Confidential didn't come to pass.

It’s not all that straightforward though, with Moffat’s hand can be seen elsewhere. As well as the idea of an every day piece of landscape become a portal of doom (and having had my own adventures I can tell you being pulled into the earth is no fun so exactly like being born), the spectre of older Amy and Rory on the hill are an incursion from the main story arc and ripe to reconfigure the story from an alternative viewpoint, perhaps shot in similar style to a similar scene between Harry Potter and Hermione Granger in the film version of The Prison of Azkaban(somewhat oddly since Rory is probably fulfilling the Ron Weasley role in the rest of the series) were the two watched their recent past spinning out unable to interfere.

This is The Waters of Mars, really…

All of the talk of fixed points in history in the trailer for Cold Blood suggests were heading back into time in flux “This is The Waters of Mars, really…” territory next week, which brings me to that retrospective reservation. The deleted scene, the one revealed in Doctor Who Confidential which if you didn’t see it shows the Doctor and Amy’s walk to the mine. Something has clearly gone awry if the first cut of an episode is fifteen minutes too long (did no one notice at the scripting stage?) and one casualty was what looked it should have been one of the best scenes of the season (and certainly would have made up for the paucity of Amy in the rest of the episode – was the she biggest causality of the cutting massacre?).

In the clips we saw, the Doctor and Amy are simply talking and laughing and joking about and talking about the main arc and Rory in the TARDIS in a way that they haven’t really since the first episode of this series. The performances are relaxed and fresh and lensed in a beautiful mix of steady-cam mid-shot from the front and heading off into the distance from the back. In this kind of show, these are the kinds of character scenes which people remember far longer than a bit of running (cf, the domestic chat between the Doctor and Rose in The Impossible Planet) and though I understand why such a long sequence had to be chopped for timing at that point in the episode, it’s a pity that it couldn’t have been tucked in somewhere else by way of a flashback.

the Tenth axis

Nevertheless with the strength of the writing elsewhere, there were
enough other good character moments for the Doctor to go some way in
making up for this aboration. If Chibnall’s interpretation sailed very
close to the Tenth axis with a few of His catchphrases creeping in (“I
love a mine.”/“You are beautiful!”), he did give Matt Smith another
opportunity to demonstrate his facility for working with children (“No,
they’re afraid of me.”), his fallibility in letting the child spin off
on his own and the very calm unwrapping of a villain’s armoury of
bullshit we’ve already seen in The
Vampire of Venice, his cross-legged, calm, unflappable
intelligence more than a match Alaya’s thorn in the paw pretence,
quietly elucidation her options but knowing full well, based on previous experience that she has war
in her heart and that if he’s not careful it can’t end well.

Unlike this episode. Since the more typical traditional body horror of Amy’s upcoming prospective dissection may have proved too much in these sensitive times (that infamous clip of Whitehouse commenting on The Deadly Assassin having gone airborne), the chosen, more nu-Who cliffhanger with its reveal of the lizard city, like a golden version of the Gungan city (if I can risk jinxing things with a comparison like that unless the next episode reveals a giant Silurian/Eocene leader with I’M BRIAN BLESSED!’S voice) is just the kind of epic imagery beloved of the comic strips (and the novels – can anyone confirm, since I haven’t read it, if this is what Hulke had in mind in The Cave Monsters?) and with its lava pools a reminder that they’re very much not from the amphibious end of the species. If the designs in the next episode can extrapolate this vista properly, we’re in for a treat.

May 22, 2010

Steven Moffat was nine in 1970. From his infamous appearance as a precocious, freckled-faced stripling laying into Pip and Jane Baker on daytime telly in the late 80s, I’d put Chris Chibnall at about a decade younger, and thus serving his Who apprenticeship at exactly the time the Third Doctor’s era was at its most fashionable (i.e. just before it started appearing on video, and we could actually watch it).

For those who were really paying attention, there was the odd tip of the hat to Doctor Who and the Silurians in there, too

The Hungry Earth, then, is the current production team’s love letter to the vision of Barry Letts, Terry Dicks, Derek Sherwin and John Devon Roland Pertwee, adoringly riffing on everything from Inferno (big drilling project) to The Daemons (remote community cut off by force field) and The Green Death (Welsh mining village). Oh, and for those who were really paying attention, there was the odd tip of the hat to Doctor Who and the Silurians in there, too.

Okay, so it virtually wasDoctor Who and the Silurians. And that’s a significant departure for 21st Century Doctor Who: Steven Moffat has explicitly acknowledged the timeless brilliance of Malcolm Hulke’s basic premise, and the result is the first nu-Who story that feels less like a re-invention and more like a re-make for a new generation of viewers. Which is fair enough, but it does leave us old-timers frequently asking “Yeah, and?”. For anyone even on nodding terms with the original, none of the mysteries presented here are very mysterious at all: Why are people being dragged underground? That’ll be the Silurians, then. Why are there so many empty graves? Yep, Silurians again.

I’m assuming we’ll get an explanation of why Alaya started out wearing a B.E.M. mask, unless she just got it free with Doctor Who Adventures

Not that you’d necessarily recognise them, as they’re the latest deign classic to have undergone a radical makeover. Sydney Newman would no doubt approve: the Silurians are no longer bug eyed monsters; now they’re just, erm, eyed monsters. (I’m assuming we’ll get an explanation of why Alaya started out wearing a B.E.M. mask, unless she just got it free with Doctor Who Adventures.)

I really enjoyed the first 20 minutes or so of this. How lovely to see rolling valleys and country churchyards in Doctor Who again . Some people complained that RTD and co didn’t make Wales look enough like alien planets; I don’t think they made it look enough like Wales. But here it was in all its lush, bucolic, picture postcard glory. The idea of focusing on an ordinary family was also a nice one, especially in the economically written pre-titles teaser, which managed to make us care about Mo in the very short time before he met his grisly fate. It does raise the question, though, of why the world’s most ambitious drilling operation is being project managed by a group of people who look like they should be running the village post office instead. It’s as if a couple of EastEnders families have clubbed together to roll back the frontiers of subterranean exploration (“Ere, mind me drill for minute, will ya?”).

That’s not a story, it’s a see-saw

For me, things started to fall apart when the main plot kicked in. Or, rather, when I realised it wasn’t really going to. Back in 2005, Russell T Davies warned that, in the new era of 45-minute stories, a single billing was in danger of giving away the entire plot. That’s never been more true than here: We knew it was about humans drilling down into the Earth while something else… okay, while the Silurians were drilling upwards and… yep, that was pretty much what it amounted to. That’s not a story, it’s a see-saw.

And so it was that the main set-piece of the episode involved waiting for three mysterious blips (oh no, hang on a minute, isn’t this the story with the Silurians in? That’s probably what they’ll be) to reach the surface, while our heroes rushed about rigging an A-Team-style lash-up that would allow the Doctor to watch it all on telly and then zap the enemy with his Time Lord version of the Red Button.

(Incidentally, this series has a very odd concept of time. Not the time-wimey stuff, but actual time, which tends to shrink or contract according to the needs of the plot. In Victory of the Daleks, Professor Pinocchio takes space-faring Spitfires from the design concept to physical launch stage in the time it takes the Doctor to eat a jammie dodger. In Flesh and Stone, Amy risks opening her eyes for “less than a second”, during which she finds time for a leisurely conversation. And here, Team Doctor gather all the camera equipment in the village and rig up a CCTV system in a minute-and-a-half. God help Steve Moffat if he ever goes on Countdown.)

Drag me to Heck

Random narks:

What did Alaya do to Elliot? And, even if her unfeasibly long Gene Simmons tongue was conveniently on 24-hour re-charge, why didn’t she do the same to the Doctor? Or just Do One from that particularly un-secure looking crypt with the big window, for that matter?

How come it took Ambrose such an eternity to realise her son was missing? Did she not think to check for him at any earlier point as she huddled in an isolated church under attack from rampaging creatures?

That “Star Trek lurch” acting as the TARDIS was pulled underground. Very lame.

The way Matt Smith – otherwise a God, obviously – said “So don’t insult me”. Not sure why – just suddenly sounded less like a 900-year-old Time Lord and more like he was admonishing his fag at Norhtampton School For Posh Boys.

Random cool stuff:

Alaya’s graveyard pursuit of Elliot – especially the bit where he tried to get through the door. So close to sanctuary, but so far. Chilling.

The Doctor’s heat sensor Ray-Bans. Those Doctor Who Adventures free gifts just keep on coming.

Poor old Amy being dragged to Hell. Okay, maybe not Hell – but Heck at least. Someone’s really got it in for that girl, haven’t they?

Malcolm Hulke, Colin Thor and Alan Punisher.

Of course, we didn’t really need to watch this to know that Chris Chibnall is no Malcolm Hulke. (Have you ever stopped to think what a brilliant name Malcolm Hulke is? Like Colin Thor, or Alan Punisher.) Fortunately, though, Matt Smith is no Jon Pertwee (on the contrary, he’s still a Troughton man through and through – check out that bandy-legged run at 28:22 for further proof) and I’d take the prospect of Eleven exploring an underground city with Meera Syal over Three rubbing his neck and arguing with the man from the ministry any day. (By the way, if next week’s plot resolution to doesn’t involve the dyslexic kid managing to read something vital at some point, I’ll eat my copy of Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters.)

So the script and story may have been below par, but there were enough button-punchingly traditional Doctor Who trappings – it looks like the sort of cosily familiar Who we haven’t seen much of in recent years – to make it curiously charming, despite itself.

Amy’s Choice isn’t a bad Doctor Who story, in fact it’s quite a good one. But that’s the problem: it’s not great, merely good. Normally, as with last week’s (The) Vampires (in/of) Venice, I’m content to enjoy the ride it for what it is, but here I can’t because this story could have been so much better than it ended up. It aims for excellence and misses the mark. The “which world is real?” premise is poorly realized, and the character development that’s meant to have occurred fails to materialize in quite the way it should.

Did anyone really believe for even a moment that “five years later” was the reality of the situation, and would be the new status quo of the series going forward? The way the story presents the dilemma, it’s either the TARDIS or Leadworth, and despite the twist where they’re both dreams, the fact that the story will end with them standing in the TARDIS is obvious from the beginning. Amy and Rory’s life not only fails to ring true, but doesn’t even make an honest attempt, and this severely undermines the story.

Even this isn’t a problem when it’s done in other situations; a similar premise has been employed in dozens of other shows, and although the protagonist has always been thrown into doubt about the reality of things, the audience never is. No Buffy fan really thinks that “Normal Again” will end with Buffy rejecting Sunnydale, after all, there wouldn't be much of a show left if she did. And Lost fans, though we may joke, fully realize that the Island isn’t Hurley’s dream (and if it were, would we really learn that in the middle of the show’s second season?). But that’s fine, and we as the audience are willing to indulge the premise and observe the drama for what it is without going so far to buy into the dilemma.

But Doctor Who (and this series in particular) has the opportunity to do us one better. We can actually be made to believe that the show will jump five years, but this episode refuses engage us on that level. Going into this episode, I was entirely willing to accept the possibility that the five-year gap was real and would define the status quo of the remaining five episodes. Because of The Eleventh Hour, we as an audience are uniquely positioned in such a way that we’re capable not only of suspending our disbelief, but of actually believing. Amy’s Choice completely misses that opportunity by making the Leadworth scenes too dreamlike to believe, through fault of both writing and direction, and failing to set them up in such a way that they seem even remotely connected to what we’ve seen so far.

The show basically tells us that Amy has grown emotionally, when it’s really not at all clear that that’s happened.

The other problem with this episode is the “character development”. It’s always annoying when a television episode ends with the characters actually discussing their own development, because it either means the writer is talking down to the audience (something that must never happen in Doctor Who) or else they lack faith in their own abilities to show character development in the traditional manner: by... well, having us witness the character as they develop. Here, the show basically tells us that Amy has grown emotionally, by making this huge choice, when it’s really not at all clear that that’s even happened.

We’re supposed to believe that Amy’s “Choice” was a choice between Rory and the Doctor, and that the Dream Lord was the Doctor trying to force her to make a choice once and for all. Apparently, she chose Rory over the Doctor in the end, but that’s not really the case, is it? She chose Rory alive over Rory dead. Are we supposed to accept that, had the Doctor died in one reality, she would not have chosen the same way? The only real way to frame a choice between Rory and the Doctor would be to have Rory die in one world and the Doctor die in the other. Now that would have been an interesting dilemma, but for whatever reason (possibly because it would be too horrifying for 6:25 PM on a Saturday, or possibly because it would be too similar to Turn Left), the story isn’t willing to go there.

So in the end, Amy chooses to live in the reality where zero of her boys is dead, rather than one (how difficult that must have been for her). Also, she erases her five-year marriage to Rory in Leadworth, complete with unborn child, to wind up with the Doctor and Rory in the TARDIS. The issue of whether Amy could really be happily married to Rory, which certainly seemed to be on the table in this story, is never really addressed at all. In fact, her rejection of Leadworth, which is clearly what Rory wants, is still a problem for the couple. All that we really learn is that Amy prefers Rory to be alive. Even so, the episode leaves off with Amy, Rory, and the Doctor in the TARDIS, Amy and Rory’s relationship reaffirmed and the two of them along for adventure...

Wait, isn’t that exactly where The Vampires of Venice left off? Then what’s supposed to have happened in this episode?

I didn’t hate the episode, I just found it disappointing that a story which promised to go above and beyond the usual was merely a solid Doctor Who story. A lot in this episode worked, including the menacing pensioners and a lot of great dialogue moments. Matt Smith continues to impress, as does Arthur Davrill as Rory (can we keep him?). I still find Karen Gillan incredibly charming and likable, although since Flesh and Stone I’ve had doubts about her character’s emotional arc and what we see in this episode does little to reassure me. But I’ll hold back on that until I’ve seen a bit more.

The best thing about this episode by far is the character of the Dream Lord, for reasons that have been discussed in other reviews. Whether this is an attempt to gradually introduce the Valeyard to modern audiences or simply to inject a bit of McCoy darkness into the current Doctor, or some combination of both, I approve of it. Toby Jones does quite well with the role and he’s well-served by most of the material he’s given. I would love to see the Dream Lord again, and if this is the first part of a grander plan then perhaps someday I’ll look with more kindness on this episode. For now, though, I’ll just remember it as a decent story which was well served by its cast and made great use of a limited budget, but failed to live up to its own high aspirations.

May 21, 2010

Blimey, this season of Doctor Who is turning out to be a bit erratic, isn't it? It's currently as reliable as the Liberal bloody Democrats.

After the barnstorming Eleventh Hour we've had to endure the glorified toy advert that was Victory of the Daleks and the woefully uneven Beast Below. And then, just as the series appeared to have hit its stride with a fantastic Weeping Angel two-parter, we were subjected to the unholy mess that was The Catfish of Croatia, an episode so banal I couldn't bring myself to review it (space fish are supposed to be scarier than bona fide vampires? Are you absolutely sure?).

And then Amy's Choice comes along.

I suspected that I was in for a bit of a treat when Den of Geek gave the episode a distinctly lukewarm preview - they are usually wide of the mark so this ramped up my expectations to a ridiculous degree. And I wasn't disappointed. In fact, it's the first time since Blink that I've felt compelled to watch an episode twice in the same evening. You have to - it cries out to be experienced again with the benefit of hindsight, even if the catalyst for the threat is utter bobbins. But who cares about improbable specks of psychic dust when the ultimate revelation is so damn potent.

Toby Jones was the Doctor all along!

Yes, Toby Jones was the Doctor all along. Or maybe he was the Valeyard. Whatever floats your boat. Either way, it was a powerful reveal (made even more disturbing by the flippant manner in which it was delivered) and I honestly didn't see it coming, even if the giveaway line about no one hating the Doctor quite so much seems painfully obvious in retrospect. It's also the second time that this show has postulated the premise that our hero has the innate potential to be a complete and utter bastard. Not to mention a sexual predator with some serious self-esteem issues.

In Star Trek this would be the result of a quaintly segregated parallel universe or a bizarre transporter accident but in Doctor Who we are told to accept the fact that the villain of the piece is buried deep within the psyche of our hero. And still is.

How macabre is that?

Toby Jones' performance as the Doctor's dark side is delicately balanced; it could have been disastrous in lesser hands but Jones manages to colour the role with just the right shades of menace, charm and sadism, which can't have been an easy task given the increasingly surreal brief he had to work with. He even manages to give Matt Smith a run for his money (which is really saying something) and practically every line he says is quotable; his rant about the Doctor's endless list of tawdry quirks elicited genuine applause from this quarter. I'd love to see him return for a re-match soon.

A sexual predator with some serious self-esteem issues...

I was also impressed at how deftly Simon Nye managed to keep me guessing when it came to working out which world was the real one. It says a lot about Doctor Who when a spooky village possessed by marauding OAPs could quite easily be the plausible threat, and while it's admittedly a bit of a cheat at the end of the day (the fact that it's impossible to correctly work out which reality was "real" really irritated me initially) the concept at the heart of the story is one of the funniest, scariest and most complex ever devised for this programme.

The Mid-afternoon of the Practically Dead siege plays into our collective fears about old age and impending death with a potency that alarmed me. You could almost smell the stale piss and Werther's Originals as they advanced on the house in a twisted parody of Assault on Precinct 13 and Cocoon, and while I should have been laughing at the marching Zimmer frames I found myself gripped by a increasingly morbid horror. Sadly, while grannies up and down the country are reported to find themselves with tingling nipples and a warm glow whenever they run into Tom Baker, Matt Smith will probably end up with a chorus of scornful tuts and cold shoulders as a generation of children start treating their grandparents with suspicion.

Mid-afternoon of the Practically Dead

I've noticed that some Pond/Gillan scepticism has reared its head over the last couple of weeks. I just don't get it. Yes, she's full of contradictions, kooky mannerisms and bouts of selfishness but that just makes her feel like a fully-rounded character to me. Even if the crack of doom isn't exerting a malign influence over Amy, her actions seem perfectly reasonable when examined in context.

Amy's lack of compassion for her unborn child, as she hastily cobbles together s suicide pact with the Doctor, could simply be interpreted as yet another subtle clue that the OAP world wasn't real, even if I'm still surprised that the Doctor would go along with her plan considering that he didn't know for sure that she was right, and she wasn't exactly thinking straight having just seen Rory crumble to dust like that.

Just think, there's an alternative reality out there where the Doctor is painfully regenerating next to the twitching corpse of his pregnant companion. Assuming of course that crashing a bus into a wall at 5 miles an hour doesn't result in anything more serious than whiplash and a bruised elbow.

It's a turning point for Amy Pond and it concludes her opening mini-arc beautifully. For the last few weeks I haven't really understood what Rory and Amy were doing together. Rory is certainly a likeable, if vaguely pathetic, character but I've been labouring under the impression that Amy was simply settling for second best until someone better came along. Yes, it's an immature attitude to have but it's also very, very real. Her realisation that she really does love the daft bugger felt right and truthful because In the words of Joni Mitchell, you don't know what you've got till it's gone... Trite, maybe, but it felt right to me. How she'll develop from here remains to be seen of course...

I adored Amy's Choice. Just writing about it now just makes me want to watch it all over again and even if Chris Chibnal's effort turns out to be utter rubbish tomorrow (Den of Geek seem to like it) I really won't care. Stories as good as this only come up once every 2 or 3 weeks so I'll savour them while I can.